JFK in Palm Beach: Where the Kennedy identity’ grew

Friday

Joseph P. Kennedy was not really like most men, except when it came to two specific enthusiasms.

1. His children, insofar as they were positive reflections of him.

2. Florida.

In due time, he passed his passion for the latter on to his children, especially Jack.

And so it was that a day or two after the 1960 presidential election, John Fitzgerald Kennedy came to Palm Beach, to his father’s house at 1095 N. Ocean Blvd. There was nothing unusual about that; he had been coming to Palm Beach since at least 1926, and the Kennedy family had owned the house since 1933.

But now everything was different. John Kennedy was no longer just another rich man from the northeast coming down to get out of the brutal winter; John Kennedy was now the president of the United States. Accompanying him were his valet and secretary, his wife, a nurse for the children, a maid and a private secretary. An adjacent beach house was overflowing with cooks, maids, pool men, chauffeurs and hairdressers. There was also a retinue of Secret Service agents and reporters hovering at all hours.

One writer said that it all had the ingredients of "a Preston Sturges or Kaufman and Hart screwball comedy, in which several generations of an eccentric family trip over one another in a creaky mansion where the phones never stopped ringing, doors never ceased slamming, typewriters clack around the clock, doorbells sound perpetually, and guests never stop arriving and departing."

It was all very exciting for a tight, fairly provincial resort island like Palm Beach, and the next three years would bring the world’s spotlight to Palm Beach, which was only too happy to absorb the attention.

In some respects, it was a recognizable world — Cartier and Wally Findlay Galleries were on Worth Avenue, the Colony and The Breakers were full of vacationers.

In other respects, it was a world gone with the wind. Hattie Carnegie was still selling women’s hats, and when JFK came to town, crowds would gather on the Southern bridge to wave to the president as he rode from the airport to the winter White House in a Lincoln convertible.

He would return to Palm Beach for the last time just a week before the searing tragedy that provided a pivot point for a generation.

Then, and for 32 years after Jack Kennedy died, the house on North Ocean Boulevard was a constant in lives that were like no other.

THE GROWTH OF THE ‘KENNEDY IDENTITY’

Rose Kennedy first came to Palm Beach in 1911, when Henry Flagler was still alive to spread the gospel of Florida, and she and her husband Joe began visiting the island after they were married.

Beginning in 1926, and continuing for the rest of his life, Joe Kennedy came down every winter — his preferred route was a train from Grand Central to Jacksonville, then to Palm Beach — to relax and play golf. He’d usually stay at the Royal Poinciana Hotel: 30 acres, 540 rooms, a 1,200-seat dining room, gardens and dancing at the Coconut Grove. Just down the road was Col. Edward Riley Bradley’s Beach Club, a gentleman’s gambling resort widely believed to have the best food in Palm Beach.

Rose would stay in Palm Beach for a week or two, but Joe would spend all winter in Palm Beach. He could do business here, all sorts of business — Palm Beach was where his affair with Gloria Swanson was consummated.

It wasn’t until 1933 that Joe decided to commit and buy a house. It was a faux Meditteranean Addison Mizner house that had been built for Rodman Wanamaker, of the Philadelphia department store Wanamaker’s. Joe paid $105,000 for the house and another $15,000 for the lot next door — about $2 million today.

The house was not really a prepossessing mansion, but it provided what Kennedy needed. It had lots of bedrooms, a large garage, room for a pool and tennis courts. Joe customized it even more, building what he called "the bullpen," where he could sunbathe in the nude while conducting business on the phone. The house had an eerie similarity to the family’s Hyannis Port house — on an incline, a stone’s throw from the ocean.

"Joe loved the separation, the distance," says his biographer David Nasaw. "He was not part of the Palm Beach establishment and didn’t want to be. He didn’t have parties, and he didn’t contribute. He was always here by himself."

The reality was that Rose and Joe led separate lives, living apart as many as 300 days a year.

"Joe would come down to Palm Beach for two or three months," says Nasaw, "and Rose would visit with the kids for Christmas, spend a little time with him, then go back with the kids."

Palm Beach wasn’t a place to be seen for the Kennedys as much as it was a place where they gradually found their identity. "Palm Beach and Hyannis Port forged them," says Kennedy biographer Lawrence Leamer. "Joe and Rose identified with the British artistocracy, and that’s how they raised their children. Wealthy people ship their kids off to school and see very little of them, and that’s what the Kennedys did."

Jack was shipped off, too. In the winter of 1931, Jack was in the seventh grade at Riverdale in New York and miserable. He would get dizzy at Mass, felt weak and almost fainted. His father brought him to Palm Beach at Easter to get his weight up and get some sun.

This became something of a pattern. In the winter of 1933-34, when Jack was at Choate in Connecticut, Joe wrote nudging letters to Jack about his mediocre grades, but he still brought him and the other three older children to Palm Beach for Easter. Despite the bribes, Jack’s grades never really improved — he was always disinclined to take things seriously just because other people did.

In early 1934, Jack collapsed with a low blood count and a high temperature. He ended up jaundiced and lost a lot of weight, which was no joke because he was skinny to begin with. He spent the fall of 1934 at Palm Beach, with private tutors helping him keep up — after a fashion — with school.

For Jack, Palm Beach was associated with warm family times, with celebration, with the restoration of health. On those occasions when the family was together, they would attend the 10 a.m. Mass at St. Edward’s Church on North County Road, then head over to Green’s Pharmacy for lunch — usually hamburgers and french fries.

"Those times when they were together in Palm Beach or Hyannis Port were so intense, and so great for them," says Leamer. "They all loved being together, and they didn’t trust anybody else, not really. The Kennedys weren’t friends to you, but you could be friends to them. It wasn’t really an Irish clan thing, it was more of a Jewish thing. When Joe went to Hollywood, he saw how the Jews watched out for each other. He respected that and he came back and said, ‘That’s what we’re going to do.’ "

For Joe, Palm Beach was a closed universe. He played golf nearly every day at the Palm Beach Country Club, the "Jewish club," where he was supposedly the only Gentile member, at least until the Duke of Windsor was admitted. Joe’s golf game was solid, and it was fast. He gave up tennis when a couple of his kids started to beat him, but he managed to maintain an edge at golf. He never lost a ball or a bet. If it looked like one of his sons might beat him, he’d start to make ominous comments warning them that they were only "two up with three to go." They’d feel the pressure and fold.

In 1940, Jack stayed with his dad in Palm Beach for six weeks, and brought a couple of buddies with him, while Joe’s visitors included Walter Winchell and David Sarnoff. They played golf, they ate a lot of fish prepared by Joe’s house chef, and they would go out to Bradley’s casino, where Joe would never bet more than a couple of dollars.

"If you talk about the growth of the Kennedy identity, this was the place," says Leamer. "Hyannis Port was more about sports. The social side of the Kennedys grew up in Palm Beach. Bobby didn’t really like it, but JFK did. There were girls, and Jack liked that. Joe wanted to be a British aristocrat, and Palm Beach was as close as you could get to that in America."

THE ‘COURAGEOUS’ JACK

World War II killed the eldest of Joe’s children, his namesake Joe Jr., and it almost killed Jack, who served in the Solomon Islands commanding a PT boat. The posthumous revelations about Jack’s wide-ranging relationships with sundry women gave him a somewhat skewed reputation as a ladies’ man, but there was never any emotional involvement with Jack — women were for amusement. The men who served with him in the war knew he was a man’s man.

Richard Keresey was the captain of PT 105 and met the captain of PT 109 when the latter pulled the former off a reef. Keresey had a condo in Delray Beach for decades, and in 1996, he remembered the man he knew.

"I met Jack on the beach at Guadalcanal… Jack towed us back to the harbor.

"I remember two things about that first meeting: He was the only boat captain who didn’t make a joke about my running aground, and he did his job so beautifully. He towed us toward dry dock, then cut the lines so we just drifted right in. It was a great piece of boat-handling."

After that, Keresey and Kennedy ran into each other frequently, on and off-duty.

Keresey remembers a mission to rescue some Marines trapped on another island. One of the boats assigned to the task was PT 109. When Kennedy arrived to see the man he had pulled off a reef just a few weeks before, his first comment was, "What are you doing here?"

"Never mind that," snapped Keresey, "we have to haul ass up the coast." Keresey began spewing orders, and Kennedy began carrying them out. It was at that point that Keresey realized he was ordering around his superior — Kennedy was carrying two stripes, Keresey only one-and-a-half, but that didn’t matter to Kennedy.

"This was typical of him," says Keresey. "He knew that at that moment, I knew more than he did.

"He was a man of courage, the kind of captain I wanted to see off my side on patrol. He’d stick with you all the way down to death. And Jack was good company; a great sense of humor, laughed at all my jokes. He was very popular; the men respected him. They called him `Shafty,’ because one of his favorite sayings was, `Shafted again.’ I just called him Jack. He was a first-class officer, with all the courage in the world."

PT 109 was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer, leading to the legend of Kennedy’s personal heroism in helping to save his crew despite his own injuries.

"We never thought about what we’d do after the war, and we never talked about next year or the next day," said Keresey. It was bad luck. I never heard Jack Kennedy talk about the future…"

WHERE JFK ‘LIKED TO RELAX’

After the war came politics and marriage and a slow political ascent, capped by the presidency in 1960.

"My most vivid memories of Palm Beach are still all the happy times around the pool with my brothers when I was growing up," Sen. Ted Kennedy once told The Palm Beach Post. "It was a wonderful time to relax and catch up with family news."

"When President Kennedy would come to Palm Beach, he didn’t stay long," says Agnes Ash, the former publisher of the Palm Beach Daily News. "It was too much of a hassle. The road going by the house was very difficult for the Secret Service. There was no place to park, and it was a hard place to secure. The ocean was on one side, and then there was A1A at the curve."

For the most part, JFK moved quietly around the island, although the photographer Bob Davidoff had a strange way of showing up just where the president and his family were going to be.

"He had an inside spy: Rose," says Babe Davidoff, the photographer’s widow. Davidoff was a stringer for United Press International, and Rose liked one of Davidoff’s photos that ran in the Palm Beach Daily News. The next day the Davidoff’s phone rang. It was Rose, who began calling Davidoff personally to alert him of the family’s plans.

"Ted Kennedy couldn’t figure it out; he asked one of the security guards, ‘How does he always know when we’re coming in? Someone in the house has to be tipping him off,’" Mrs. Davidoff said. "Finally he was told it was his mother."

Ted would remember that after Jack became president, "Palm Beach was where he liked to relax over the Christmas holidays. He loved the extra time he could spend with Caroline and John there. You could hear their laughter echoing all throughout the house. The first Christmas of his presidency was one of the most wonderful family gatherings we had."

Despite the family gatherings, Joe Kennedy lived as he always lived. For a time, he had an affair with a neighbor whose husband was dying of cancer. Another time, his mistress was his wife’s secretary. It was one of those families where the truth never saw the sun because the truth was never spoken.

"Did Rose know? How could she not know? But there’s no way to say that she knew definitively because she would never have confessed it," Leamer says.

Jack was like his father romantically, far more interested in the what than the who. He was a trifle more circumspect in Palm Beach — "He didn’t pick up girls at the bar at Ta-boo," says Leamer. "He wasn’t out and about so much."

Except when he was. CBS journalist Roger Mudd remembered being in the press pool that tried to follow the presidential yacht with the president’s close friend, Florida Sen. George Smathers aboard in the early ’60s.

"Smathers was probably John Kennedy’s best friend in the U.S. Senate," wrote Mudd in his memoirs. "Together or singly, they were wolves on the prowl, always able to find or attract gorgeous prey … . It was a joke, our pretending to be covering the president, bobbing around in the ocean, squinting through binoculars to find out who was coming and going but always having our view blocked by a Secret Service boat just as another long-legged Palm Beach beauty climbed aboard."

After the presidential inauguration, Palm Beach became the winter White House. But before that, Palm Beach almost became Dallas.

In December, 1960, a deranged retired postal worker named Richard Paul Pavlick tried to murder the president-elect. Pavlick drove to Florida with the idea of ramming JFK’s motorcade as the Kennedys headed for Mass, but aborted his first attempt after seeing Kennedy’s wife and two small children in the car with the President.

Authorities had been tipped off to look out for a 1950 Buick with New Hampshire plates. They spotted it on the north bridge at 9 p.m. on Dec. 15, and Palm Beach police, along with Secret Service agents, swarmed it and pulled Pavlick out.

Inside the car, they found seven sticks of dynamite and a detonator. (Pavlick later was found incompetent to stand trial and was sent to a medical center in Missouri. He died at 88 in 1975.)

‘THEY WERE THE GREAT LOVES OF THEIR LIVES’

In the second week of December, 1961, Joe Kennedy flew to Florida. He was the father of the president of the United States, happy to be back where the sun shone every day. He eagerly supervised getting the phones turned on, the newspapers delivered, the accounts on Worth Avenue reinstated.

On Dec. 19, while golfing at the Palm Beach Country Club, he began to feel unwell and had trouble with his balance. At home he took a nap, but when he woke up, he couldn’t speak, and his right side was paralyzed. It was a massive stroke; Joe Kennedy wouldn’t utter an intelligible sentence for the rest of his life.

It was the 322nd day of his son’s term in office.

The Palm Beach house was reworked for an elderly invalid. Wheelchair ramps were installed, a nurse’s station was set up outside Joe’s bedroom, a plastic roof was installed over the pool to shield him from the sun. JFK continued to come down for visits, but, as Agnes Ash says, "Seeing his father in the condition he was in couldn’t have been very pleasant. Joe was paralyzed, and he would sit for hours on the upstairs porch with a nurse."

After Joe’s stroke, Rose magically began spending more time in Palm Beach. "She started going to all the social events," says Leamer. "She started to spent whole winters down here. If you’re rich and powerful, you’re liked in Palm Beach. That’s all it takes."

Rose enjoyed and got special treatment; special prices, special tickets. Her identity was more or less that of the Queen Mum. "Rose was really very aware of her public image," says Ash. "She would often be late, but that didn’t matter. The luncheon started when Rose got there. The odd part about it was that Palm Beach was a nest of Republicans, third and fourth generation captains of industry. They weren’t a bunch of Democrats, and they didn’t care much for the Kennedys. But they were all competitive to get Rose!"

Ash remembers Rose’s shopping habits. She would go shopping on Worth Avenue, and, rather than be trailed by her car, she would send her driver home. "When she wanted to go home, she would simply stand on the curb and sure enough she never had to wait very long. Someone would pull up and ask if she needed a ride. And off she’d go. She was hitchiking!"

His father’s presence was all the impetus Jack needed to maintain Palm Beach as the winter White House, even though the house was really nothing special. By the early 1960s, the place was more than a little worn around the edges — the Kennedys never even installed air conditioning, which mandated an exit in March.

"The house was a mess," says Ash. "It was a falling-down place."

"They didn’t identify with Brahmins in the sense of money," explains Leamer. "It was the same thing with Hyannis Port. The house there always looked just like it was 1945. They were above such bourgeois sensibilities — they didn’t think they had to upgrade it. The thing about the Kennedys is that they really only cared about each other; they were the great loves of their lives."

The president’s visit to Palm Beach in November of 1963 was more or less typical — some quiet time with the old man mixed with the nuts and bolts of politics, mainly because Kennedy had set his sights on winning Florida for his re-election campaign in 1964. (He lost the state by 47,000 votes in 1960.)

That weekend is documented in the appointment books at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. He arrived on Friday, Nov. 15 at 5:15 p.m. and greeted some local dignitaries, then went to his father’s house for the night at 5:45.

The next morning at 9:40 he took Air Force One to Cape Canaveral to inspect the facilities, had a briefing with Wernher Von Braun and astronauts Gus Grissom and Gordon Cooper about the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. After that, he flew 25 miles off the coast to watch a Polaris missile fired from a submarine. By 1 p.m. he was back in Palm Beach.

On Sunday, he went to 10 a.m. Mass at St. Ann in downtown West Palm Beach, which is where Maureen Conte comes in.

"My father was always late for everything, even church," remembers Conte, a longtime Palm Beacher. "That Sunday, Mom decided we should go on without him. He would join us later. After we were seated, the priest announced there was a special visitor in the house. We all looked around, and as I turned to look behind me, I saw that my father had finally arrived in the pew behind us. He was seated next to President Kennedy! Or rather, beside the Secret Service agent next to JFK. Our eyes widened, as did my father’s, who apparently didn’t know whom his seatmate was!"

After church, Kennedy went back to the winter White House and worked on speeches. On Monday morning, he left Palm Beach at 11:15. Gary Bradley was stationed at the Coast Guard station on Peanut Island when he was called to drive the president’s valet. "My responsibility was to drive the valet to pick up his clothes, his belongings, whatever, in a Ford station wagon that was provided for him."

When Bradley got to the Kennedy house, he was taken to a trailer in the backyard, which functioned as headquarters for the Secret Service. "I was outside, talking to them, and all of a sudden up walks the president of the United States. He had a remarkable memory for faces, because he said to me, ‘I don’t recognize you. Who are you?’

"I told him that I was Gary Bradley from the Coast Guard over on Peanut Island, and he said, ‘I’m always happy to meet a serviceman,’ and stuck out his hand. And then he was off to the airport.

"I wanted to steal something as a souvenir, but I didn’t. It was a moment and a treasure that I’ve held onto for 50 years now."

Among the dozen or so people gathered to see him off was long-time West Palm Beach lawyer William Pruitt, the Palm Beach campaign manager for Sen. Smathers.

"Two things impressed me," remembers Pruitt. "One, JFK was very charismatic. Two, he was introduced to all of us, and when he left to board Air Force One, he called us all by name."

The President flew to Tampa for a couple of speeches, then on to Miami at 4:35 p.m. for a rally and dinner speech. At 9:20 p.m. he flew back to Washington.

His appointment books already had time apportioned to come back to Palm Beach for a few days at Christmas, but before that there was work to do — governing and politicking, especially the latter. On Thursday, the 21st, he had to make another trip down South for more fence-mending. Lyndon Johnson had been put on the ticket expressly to enable Kennedy to take Texas, and so he had, by 46,000 votes.

It wasn’t enough; the state needed shoring up, so the plan was to fly to Fort Worth, then move on the next day.

He had appointments in Dallas.

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